Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

"Anything you want, but come."

"I can just see it now, the punchbowl and all the ladies in their lawn hats and the hi-fi playing hearts and flowers organ music and everybody wipin their eyes cause the bride is so beautiful. What you wanta get all involved in the middle class for, Rhoda?"

She said "Ah I don't care, I wanta start living." Her fiance had a lot of money. Actually he was a nice guy and I felt sorry for him having to smile through all this.

After they left Japhy said "She won't stay with him more than six months. Rhoda's a real mad girl, she'd rather put on jeans and go hiking than sit around Chicago apartments."

"You love her, don't you?"

"You damn right, I oughta marry her myself."

"But she's your sister."

"I don't give a goddamn. She needs a real man like me. You don't know how wild she is, you weren't brought up with her in the woods." Rhoda was real nice and I wished she hadn't shown up with a fiance. In all this welter of women I still hadn't got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood.

But then I'd find something like a dead crow in the deer park and think "That's a pretty sight for sensitive human eyes, and all of it comes out of sex." So I put sex out of my mind again. As long as the sun shined then blinked and shined again, I was satisfied. I would be kind and remain in solitude, I wouldn't pook about, I'd rest and be kind.

"Compassion is the guide star," said Buddha. "Don't dispute with the authorities or with women. Beg. Be humble." I wrote a pretty poem addressed to all the people coming to the party: "Are in your eyelids wars, and silk… but the saints are gone, all gone, safe to that other." I really thought myself a kind of crazy saint. And it was based on telling myself "Ray, don't run after liquor and excitement of women and talk, stay in your shack and enjoy natural relationship of things as they are" but it was hard to live up to this with all kinds of pretty broads coming up the hill every weekend and even on weeknights. One time a beautiful brunette finally consented to go up the hill with me and we were there in the dark on my mattress day-mat when suddenly the door burst open and Sean and Joe Mahoney danced in laughing, deliberately trying to make me mad… either that or they really believed in my effort at asceticism and were like angels coming in to drive away the devil woman. Which they did, all right. Sometimes when I was really drunk and high and sitting crosslegged in the midst of the mad parties I really did see visions of holy empty snow in my eyelids and when I opened them I'd see all these good friends sitting around waiting for me to explain; and nobody ever considered my behavior strange, quite natural among Buddhists; and whether I opened my eyes to explain something or not they were satisfied. During that whole season, in fact, I had an overwhelming urge to close my eyes in company. I think the girls were terrified of this.

"What's he always sitting with his eyes closed for?"

Little Prajna, Sean's two-year-old daughter, would come and poke at my closed eyelids and say "Booba. Hack!" Sometimes I preferred taking her for little magic walks in the yard, holding her hand, to sitting yakking in the living room.

As for Japhy he was quite pleased with anything I did provided I didn't pull any boners like making the kerosene lamp smoke from turning the wick too far up, or failing to sharpen the ax properly. He was very stern on those subjects. "You've got to learn!" he'd say. "Dammit, if there's anything I can't stand is when things ain't done right." It was amazing the suppers he'd roust up out of his own part of the food shelf, all kinds of weeds and dry roots bought in Chinatown and he'd boil up a mess of stuff, just a little, with soy sauce, and that went on top of freshly boiled rice and was delicious indeed, eaten with chopsticks.

There we were sitting in the roar of trees at dusk with our windows wide open still, cold, but going chomp-chomp on delicious home-made Chinese dinners. Japhy really knew how to handle chopsticks and shoveled it in with a will. Then I'd sometimes wash the dishes and go out to meditate awhile on my mat beneath the eucalypti, and in the window of the shack I'd see the brown glow of Japhy's kerosene lamp as he sat reading and picking his teeth. Sometimes he'd come to the door of the shack and yell "Hoo!" and I wouldn't answer and I could hear him mutter "Where the hell is he?" and see him peering out into the night for his bhikku. One night I was sitting meditating when I heard a loud crack to my right and I looked and it was a deer, coming to re-visit the ancient deer park and munch awhile in the dry foliage. Across the evening valley the old mule went with his heartbroken "Hee haw" broken like a yodel in the wind: like a horn blown by some terribly sad angel: like a reminder to people digesting dinners at home that all was not as well as they thought. Yet it was just a love cry for another mule. But that was why…

One night I was meditating in such perfect stillness that two mosquitoes came and sat on each of my cheekbones and stayed there a long time without biting and then went away without biting.

A few days before his big farewell party Japhy and I had an argument. We went into San Francisco to deliver his bike to the freighter at the pier and then went up to Skid Row in a drizzling rain to get cheap haircuts at the barber college and pook around Salvation Army and Goodwill stores in search of long underwear and stuff. As we were walking in the drizzly exciting streets ("Reminds me of Seattle!" he yelled) I got the overwhelming urge to get drunk and feel good. I bought a poorboy of ruby port and uncapped it and dragged Japhy into an alley and we drank. "You better not drink too much," he said, "you know we gotta go to Berkeley after this and attend a lecture and discussion at the Buddhist Center."

"Aw I don't wanta go to no such thing, I just wanta drink in alleys."

"But they're expecting you, I read all your poems there last year."

"I don't care. Look at that fog flyin over the alley and look at this warm ruby red port, don't it make ya feel like singing in the wind?"

"No it doesn't. You know, Ray, Cacoethes says you drink too much."

"And him with his ulcer! Why do you think he has an ulcer? Because he drank too much himself. Do I have an ulcer? Not on your life! I drink for joy! If you don't like my drinking you can go to the lecture by yourself. I'll wait at Coughlin's cottage."

"But you'll miss all that, just for some old wine."

"There's wisdom in wine, goddam it!" I yelled. "Have a shot!"

"No I won't!"

"Well then I'll drink it!" and I drained the bottle and we went back on Sixth Street where I immediately jumped back into the same store and bought another poorboy. I was feeling fine now.

Japhy was sad and disappointed. "How do you expect to become a good bhikku or even a Bodhisattva Mahasattva always getting drunk like that?"

"Have you forgotten the last of the Bulls, where he gets drunk with the butchers?"

"Ah so what, how can you understand your own mind essence with your head all muddled and your teeth all stained and your belly all sick?"

"I'm not sick, I'm fine. I could just float up into that gray fog and fly around San Francisco like a seagull. D'l ever tell you about Skid Row here, I used to live here-"

"I lived on Skid Road in Seattle myself, I know all about all that."

The neons of stores and bars were glowing in the gray gloom of rainy afternoon, I felt great. After we had our haircuts we went into a Goodwill store and fished around bins, pulling out socks and undershirts and various belts and junk that we bought for a few pennies. I kept taking surreptitious slugs of wine out of my bottle which I had wedged in my belt.